A most delicate experiment
by irenelefay
Summary: "It was the most delicate of experiments, one that couldn't be exposed to the open air or the elements, or it would disintegrate and die. It had begun in the summer, she thought. They'd been living together for two years. Sherlock knew that Joanna dated women; she'd seen them tiptoe around the place at three, four in the morning, to go to the loo or drink some water in the kitchen,


A most delicate experiment

And after all was said and done, after filing the report for the theatre case, submitting it and receiving a friendly pat on the back from his superior and an eye roll from Sherlock, Detective Inspector Lestrade ended up being stopped at the entrance of Scotland Yard, one Tuesday evening, by a fair youth who handed him an envelope containing four tickets for some modern version of Andromaque premiere at the most obnoxious theatre in all of London.

"That's so generous," he ended up stammering, after a long and painful attempt at declining, because it didn't sound too professional, and he had nothing appropriate to wear, after losing his wardrobe to the divorce. "Tell your employer that he didn't have to," he tried one last time.

The pale youth that had handed him the envelope just replied with an indecipherable grin.

"Why are there six of them?" he tried to ask, but the fair youth had already walked away. He was left staring at her coat and purse, in the cold London air. Christmas was approaching, and the shopkeepers had already filled their windows with obnoxious decorations; large, shiny balls of gold and silver were already hanging on cables in the larger streets.

So Lestrade was left wondering in front of Scotland Yard, underneath a large golden ribbon.

He called the fair youth's employer first thing the next morning, thanking him again for the generous gift.

"Nonsense," the employer replied, "it is a pleasure for us to have representatives of our police force, at such an important event…"

"Thank you, sir, but may I ask…"

"Bring your wife, of course," the other man interrupted him, unknowingly awakening a foul mood in Lestrade that would probably last the whole morning. "And detective Donovan can bring her husband too!" he added almost as an afterthought, even though he and Donovan had worked on the case together, despite his colleague's reluctance to the consulting detective's involvement. "We want to have as many people from as many backgrounds as possible in attendance, in this new exciting season for our great theatre, full of history! Our new creative director…"

The clock on his desk was white and cheap, a relic from his divorce, and it often fell behind. It was too slow at counting seconds, although it wasn't really noticeable, even when Lestrade tried staring at it. As the employer spoke, the Detective Inspector checked his own wristwatch and corrected the time on the battered clock.

"And the other two tickets?" Lestrade asked in the end, taking advantage of a pause in the employer's loud monologue, that he probably only made to allow himself to breathe.

"For that consulting detective of yours, of course! She was such a great help in our case. She gets a plus one, too!"

And that's how Lestrade found out he was going to attend a premiere at the most obnoxious theatre of London, near the middle of December, together with a plus one that was still to be determined, Donovan's live-in partner, Sherlock Holmes and whatever human being constituted her romantic life.

First, he told Gregson. To check. To make sure that it was fine, and wasn't overstepping any kind of boundary in the context of an investigation, albeit a closed one. Just to be extremely sure – the reputation of the whole police force was at stake, after all. He even hoped for a screaming fit from his boss, however scary those were.

"We received a formal invite," his superior informed him instead, after he'd performed the customary bow upon entering his office and explained the situation as well as he could. Lestrade wondered why, then, the employer had sent that fair youth to wait for him outside his workplace, to give him the tickets inside a blank envelope, like some kind of mob boss.

"So put on a shirt, and smile for the cameras. The wife will love it! You're still married, right?"

He bowed again.

So he went, and announced it to Donovan first.

As expected, she first raised some questions about the morality and legality of the whole thing. They were not stupid questions and even Lestrade conceded that he should have spent a bit more time thinking the whole thing through.

"The case is closed," he said in the end, "and we'll be there officially, as representatives of the whole police force. And Gregson says it's fine, anyway."

"So, an official thing," Sally stated. "How many of us did he invite?"

Lestrade found that his mouth had done the thing it did when he knew he had to say something, but he really didn't want to – which was his greatest fear every time he had to announce someone's death to their immediate family, which was an unfortunately common occurrence, given the nature of his job. He ransacked his pocket looking for anything that could keep his hands busy.

"Gregson?" Donovan preceded him, because she'd noticed the thing his mouth had done.

"Just the two of us, from the Yard," he said, "with plus ones, of course," and he thought that he could have invited her as his plus one, if the fair youth hadn't handed him so many fucking tickets. Provided, of course, that Donovan's scary live-in partner didn't actually mind.

"And?" Sally asked.

"He said to give the last two tickets to Sherlock Holmes," he said, squinting, unable to help himself – his face had done the thing it did when he was a child and he broke the flower vases while playing with the ball in the yard. More specifically, the face he made when he had to tell his mum what had happened.

"I see," Sally Donovan just said.

So he figured that a diplomatic mission to 221b, Baker Street, was in his near future, but before he even had the time to plan it, Gregson threw another file on his desk.

And his plans were kind of ruined, because someone, in West London, had seen it fit to murder an old lady with a phone charger on the floor of her own living room. Without leaving significant traces. In a flat, where none of the doors, internal or external, showed signs of intrusion, and where all the other tenants swore that she was such a sweet grandma who always gave candy to the multitude of children under the age of five who lived there.

'There' was a housing estate in a not very nice part of London. The woman, Louisa Parris, occupied the top floor, and had done so since the sixties, when she'd married her late husband, Albert. He had died just six months earlier, after a lifetime spent working at a Ford plant and a short stint as a small business owner after he'd retired.

Lestrade's assigned partner was Anderson – not like he didn't like Anderson; he was just a bit difficult to share an enclosed space with. The car ride was uncomfortably silent. The estate was large, old and poorly maintained, and it made Lestrade sad, like most cases involving the elderly. They reminded him of his old mother, who'd sold the family house in favour of a small flat after both of her sons had moved away and Mr Lestrade had died. She spent her days decorating it and crocheting and knitting and baking French bread, and generally trying to keep the vaguely French spirit alive – despite the fact that she herself was not French, and had no connection to France whatsoever other than through her dead husband. Lestrade tried to visit her as often as he could, and even though the occasions had multiplied since his divorce, she still lived pretty far away in the South, and she sometimes became a talking and walking reminder of his failed marriage. And even the walking part wasn't to be taken for granted, nowadays.

Still, his mother was alive and lived was a rather fancy estate – as he forced himself to remember as they entered – nothing like the one they were currently in: the tiled floor was a different colour from the one it had started out as, as highlighted by the few stops where the original shade still managed to emerge. It had no lift, just a narrow set of stairs with low hand railings, that Louisa Parris must have climbed every day, to go to the bakery or to the supermarket. The walls had to be thin, because he could hear at least two different small children cry their lungs out.

The door, as Lestrade had gathered, had been still locked from the inside when the firefighters had finally managed to access the building from the bathroom window. Then they'd found the woman's body on the living room floor, by the Christmas tree, her airways blocked and her windpipe shattered by the white charger of an ancient looking iPhone that some relative must have gifted her.

But, as one neighbour had told the EMTs, she did not have any living relatives, not anymore, after her husband's death: their only son, Michael, had run away in his early twenties, and was now a successful architect somewhere; he paid her rent every month and nothing more.

"What won't some people do for an inheritance," Anderson remarked, after the fifth set of stairs – they had three left – and Lestrade made a sound that could be interpreted as exhaustion, disapproval, or even agreement, even though it definitely wasn't the latter. The guy was a famous architect; the old lady lived here.

Once they got to the fourth, and last, floor, and once they were able to confirm everything they'd already been told on the phone, it was the Detective Inspector who dropped the idea first. Inside the flat the windows were all shut, and there were no signs of forced entry. She'd either choked herself to death with her own iPhone charger, and that, Lestrade felt he could safely rule out, or someone had been living inside her flat for a while, but only probably. He didn't feel confident enough to take it for certain.

"I'm not going to call her," Anderson stated, and it's not like Lestrade would've let him, anyway.

It proved itself a pointless debate, because Sherlock didn't answer seven of his calls, and when Jo finally did, she told him that she was at the surgery and that she couldn't contact her roommate, either.

So he drove, his delegation consisting of himself alone, through London traffic, to ring the doorbell of 221b, swearing to God, if He even existed, that he was going to sue Sherlock, the next time this would inevitably happen.

He figured that he probably should have come alone anyway – he couldn't exactly hand her the ticket in front of Anderson, who had worked on the case, too, even though he hadn't exactly elicited the fair youth's employer's sympathies, with his snarky comments about contemporary theatre, that Lestrade only silently related to. He decided to do it before mentioning the case, hoping to downplay the effect the invite had had – on him, at least.

Mrs Hudson opened the door, greeting him with the usual smile and showing the same deference she always had towards him, most likely convinced that he was a much bigger fish than he actually was. When he announced it to Sherlock herself, it wasn't actually all that bad – as in, she took the tickets from his hands, stared at them for a few seconds as if they were soil samples from Mars, then put them down carefully on their bare kitchen table as if they could break.

"Who's the second?" she asked him.

"It's a plus one." Then, since her expression hadn't changed: "It's when you bring a partner."

"Not necessarily," she shot back, even though, Lestrade thought, partner doesn't necessarily have to mean…

Then Sherlock shook her head, covered her mouth with a hand, then added, "I know what a plus one is. I grew up in formal situations."

Lestrade had had an inkling. He said nothing. "Yeah," Lestrade said, "right."

"Maybe Jo's into that," he suggested, then. "Or you could ask your sister," because Sherlock's sister was much more well behaved than her and kind of nice, even, the one time he'd seen her – when a pool had almost blown up murdering both Sherlock and her roommate, and in the chaos that had ensued, Mycroft had emerged from a large black vehicle with a chauffeur and tinted windows and she'd solved a lot of said chaos with just a few phone calls.

"I'll find someone," the consulting detective snapped back, "but thank you for your suggestions," and then Lestrade was about to show himself out, when he turned back on his heels to the living room and adjacent kitchenette, where Sherlock was still standing.

"You came for a case," she stated.

"Yes," Lestrade said. "Murdered old woman, sweetest grandma to ever exist according to her neighbours, no signs of forced entry. That's got to be at least a six," he tried, remembering the point system that Joanna had mentioned a few times, to him and on her blog.

"Someone had been living inside the house!" Sherlock shouted, almost triumphantly, once Lestrade was done with the tale of the old woman and the iPhone charger. "I'd read about such cases, I couldn't wait to actually see one, though. We're going?"

She was jumping in place, like a puppy – she'd actually just grabbed her coat. Her short, curly hair moved in unison with her head and hands, which clapped briefly, once.

"Want me to drive you there?"

"Jo?"

"I'll drive," Joanna's voice emerged from the kitchen. She was in jeans and was holding hot tea between her small hands. "We're going to the shops for Christmas presents later, ands you're coming," she told Sherlock.

"See you there, then," Lestrade said.

Sherlock knew they weren't actually going to buy Christmas gifts; she hoped she'd said that only because she was in the mood for driving. Joanna was a confident driver, although she drove too fast sometimes, which Sherlock Holmes didn't mind. She'd inherited the old blue car when her brother had bought a new one, and even though it was ancient, and battered, she must have had some kind of emotional attachment to it. Sherlock Holmes didn't really see the point of becoming emotionally attached to an inanimate object.

Joanna's phone began talking at irregular intervals to give her directions as she crossed the entire city, heading towards an area Sherlock quite enjoyed, having worked there several times in the past. They often listened to music on their car rides, or sometimes they talked, and laughed, when they were not on a case. Early on, at the beginning of their cohabitation, which had quickly turned into something more, Sherlock had found herself laughing quite often, and she'd realized that she had never laughed this much before. She'd realized after that first chase, after the dinner at Angelo's, when they'd just leaned back against the wall and laughed, Joanna's eyes glistening in the dark. Joanna laughed often, even more often since their thing – whatever it was that they had going on (although Sherlock knew she technically knew what it was) – had begun.

Which was why Sherlock didn't like the fact that she was not laughing now. She didn't look upset, either, but Sherlock knew her facial expression, had an almost unlimited database of them, and something was bothering her from the way her hands held the wheel, more tightly than usual.

She even considering asking, iis everything OK/i, when Joanna spoke, with the most neutral tone she was capable of.

"So," she began, "who is going to be your plus one?" Which was a perfectly harmless question, really, after all, she'd listened to Lestrade from the kitchen, where she wasn't even hiding, just enjoying her cup of tea in plain sight.

"Guess I'll ask Mycroft," she replied.

Sherlock knew she was hinting at their liaison – their relationship, Sherlock guessed – whatever it was that they had since the aftermath of the Garrideb case, and that neither of them dared mention out loud most days. It was the most delicate of experiments, one that couldn't be exposed to the open air or the elements, or it would disintegrate and die.

It had begun in the summer, she thought. They'd been living together for two years. Sherlock knew that Joanna dated women; she'd seen them tiptoe around the place at three, four in the morning, to go to the loo or drink some water in the kitchen, and they were always surprised to see Sherlock there, in the living room (she rarely slept the whole night): with her short hair, long limbs and careless demeanour, she scared them, too comfortable with the situation, too territorial, and most of all too female.

She knew that more than one woman had been driven away by her presence. iYou're a good girlfriend, Jo, and Sherlock Holmes is a very lucky woman./i

The truth was that she, unlike Joanna, who still occasionally had to turn away men who mistook her kindness for flirting and couldn't take no for an answer, who simply couldn't grasp the idea that Joanna Watson could be gay, she, Sherlock, was much easier to spot, or so she thought. iDyke/i was the nickname her classmates had given her at the all girls public school she'd attended. She could still feel it etched on her forehead in all caps.

"Or maybe I'll give the tickets to mum and dad," she added quickly, almost as an afterthought.

"If they sent that ticket to you, it's because they explicitly want you there," Jo was saying. "You can't send your parents instead. It's because of the big theatre cas…"

"The big theatre case, yes, I know, thank you."

"You can ask your sister, you know, it's fine, it's…"

"It's not fine," Sherlock interrupted her, "clearly."

Her features softened, eyes still focused on the street.

"No," she said quietly. "I should've known this was too much to ask."

"Jo, I didn't know you were into…"

"I don't give a crap about contemporary French theatre and you know that," she interrupted her. "I should have told you straight away – that I… all my life, since high school, I've refused to hide, Sherlock. Even when lying would've helped – at school, or in the army."

"You didn't tell Lestrade, when he asked you out," Sherlock pointed out.

"I… I didn't want him to think we were together, which we were, or we were about to. I didn't want to out you," she said. She looked sad, if anything, that Sherlock had brought it up. "I may not have advertised it, but I never hid it, either. I've never… dated someone closeted, and if you'd asked me a year ago, I would've told you that I wasn't going to start."

"But you did," Sherlock pointed out. Something a bit heavy was in her chest and she didn't like it. At all. She could hear her own heartbeat in her eardrums.

"Exactly," she replied. "I'm sorry. It's not fair to you."

Sherlock wanted to hold, or to cover Jo's tiny hand, which was resting on the stick, with her larger one, but she didn't dare.

"I don't see why we're arguing," she tried. "If… nothing had happened, if things were the way they were one year ago, we could still go together as friends. You're my assistant, my roommate, and you blog about me. No one would find anything strange about it."

She said it quickly to make it sound more true.

"So what you're proposing is to just go there and play close friends? Why not tell the press we have husbands while we're at it?"

And that's how she knew it had been the wrong thing to say.

"I want to be out, Sherlock," Jo said. "With or without you."

They drove the last stretch in silence.

They arrived quite a few minutes after Lestrade – Jo driving her battered blue car, Sherlock in the passenger seat with a death grip on her handbag, like a grumpy old woman at the bus stop. She did look grumpy.

"Traffic," the doctor said, then smiled, as if she was trying to justify something.

"Don't worry, I've only just arrived," he told her, even if it wasn't true.

Detective Inspector Lestrade had always more or less subconsciously liked the doctor, with her diminutive figure and quiet presence, which could nonetheless become very imposing when the situation warranted it. For example, every time Sherlock was acting out, which was a much rarer occurrence now than it had been at first, or before Joanna Watson came along, anyway. She was a good influence on Sherlock, definitely, the Detective Inspector had thought early on.

And no one really knew how or when exactly she came along – she just started showing up to crime scenes with Sherlock at some point, adding medical advice and a further level of illegality to their consulting business. She was reluctant to talk at first, and Sherlock nearly had to pry her findings out of her; afterwards she'd grown more confident, and she was, all things considered, very bright. It was hard to notice, because she always accompanied Sherlock everywhere, but Lestrade didn't doubt that, taken individually, Joanna was a very smart woman. She was a doctor, for Christ's sake.

He'd even made a move towards her, just a few months before, at the start of the summer, so as soon as he'd felt comfortable asking someone out after the divorce papers. He'd texted her an invite for dinner, that she'd declined claiming 'work', 'you're a really nice guy, but', and 'Sherlock's waiting, see you soon'. He hadn't been too devastated afterwards, and they'd even gone out for a drink at the bar a few times since. She was a football fan and could be very jovial, when not on the job. On crime scenes, she was very respectful, unlike Sherlock, and a few times she'd treated the deceased's relatives with a lot of empathy, which wasn't so strange, Lestrade now realized, since she worked in healthcare. Out of all the people who were, more or less, recurring characters in his personal life, she was the only one who hadn't first met Gregory Lestrade as a married man, and he found something almost sensual in that.

Lestrade guided them up the eight flights of stairs and through the police tape, flashing his badge, Sherlock completely unfazed, Joanna with her head bowed as if she was ashamed.

The flat would soon start smelling bad, because of all the food still in the fridge, slowly rotting and going bad, and dust would begin accumulating, and no one would ever sit on the old people armchair in front of the television anymore. The investigation over, the landlord would rent it to someone else the second after the removal of the police tape.

There was a hidden ladder, leading to some kind of crawl space, in the ceiling. It was Joanna who found it. "I lived on the top floor too," she said to justify herself, which was something she did quite often. The space above was tight, dark, and smelled foul; nonetheless, someone was going to be reprimanded by Gregson for negligence – overlooking something like that was not exactly a small mistake.

"Whoever did this must have been small," Sherlock said, pointing, for some reason, at a tabletop, then at a cupboard. "Joanna will play the part of our suspect for us," she declared, as her roommate rolled her eyes. It made sense, because she was smaller; she couldn't be taller than five four. The truth was that she looked too much like Sophie, and Lestrade had been sort of relieved when she'd turned down the dinner.

"He or she – he, I think, despite the height – climbed down from the attic during the night," Sherlock was saying. "Joanna, be a dear, move that chair over here. Like this."

She showed Joanna where to put her right foot and which cupboard to grab to lift herself off the floor and into the small crawl space. The doctor obediently copied her – her shorter legs more challenged by the height of the kitchen chair, until she could finally stand on its crocheted seat cover.

"Like this," Sherlock praised, as Joanna's body gradually disappeared, eaten by the foul smelling crawl space above them, "hold onto the little string thing – do you see any signs of…?"

Then the doctor screamed, the string thing snapped, and the chair did a little dance on its four legs before falling sideways. A moment later Joanna was falling too, on top of it.

"Lestrade!" Sherlock shouted, and, thanks to his good old days of playing football, the Detective Inspector was able to lean forward, and somehow, with his arms, catch the small of Joanna's back, while the top of her head hit a nearby radiator with a thud, skull against yellow paint, peeling and stained black.

"Thank you," Joanna said, as soon as she was back on her own two feet, "I'm so sorry, I thought that something had touched my hand, and… nice catch though, that was…"

"Are you OK?" Sherlock was between the two of them now, supporting the smaller woman with both arms around her waist and slowly guiding her to an upright position. Joanna's hands were in her hair, and, as she pulled them out, Lestrade noticed with horror that her index and middle fingers were stained red.

"I should've never suggested this, Joanna, I'm so sorry," Sherlock was saying, as Lestrade watched, feeling like he'd run out of words in the English language, and it had been a long while since he'd last spoken French. "I was an idiot, I was a bloody idiot – the dust… I'm taking you to A&E, Joanna, don't fall asleep…"

"There's really no need…" But they were already at the front door, almost through the tape, when the detective, who was supporting her friend's entire body weight, or so it seemed to Lestrade, turned towards the Detective Inspector, looking at him almost expectantly.

"What?" he said. "Don't you have her car?"

Sherlock's lips were shut tight. "She doesn't have a driving licence," Joanna explained – she'd stopped complaining about being taken to A&E, and she was quiet, which seemed like a very bad sign to Lestrade. "Oh God," Joanna was saying, as Sherlock supported her for the short walk to the car, "I wasn't supposed to be there… that sounds like an insurance nightmare!" she said, and Lestrade chose not to think about ithat/i.

Then Joanna handed him the keys of the old, battered blue car, which he drove obediently through London; then he dropped them off at the entrance of St Bart's. The first few minutes they were silent, on opposite sides of the backseat, almost like two kids who have recently been in a fight. Then Sherlock scooped closer – was she holding out the olive branch? Then Lestrade saw that the doctor's head was bleeding profusely, and Sherlock was holding a napkin, that quickly turned from white to bright red. Joanna's eyes were half closed now, and her head had fallen dangerously to the side.

"The bloody siren, Lestrade!" Sherlock shouted.

"I forgot to take it from the other car," the Detective Inspector tried to justify himself, even though the thought hadn't even crossed his mind.

They kept Joanna for the night – and Sherlock curled up in an armchair next to her, in a suspiciously nice room, in a suspiciously nice wing, that Mycroft was no doubt responsible for.

They'd sewn her head back together – Sherlock knew that head injuries could bleed a lot, which made them look scarier than they actually were, and rationally she knew that Jo hadn't lost nearly enough blood to be in any kind of danger by the time they reached A&E. But she'd seen her stumble on her way to the car, she'd seen her head fall to the side during the ride, smearing blood on the glass, as Lestrade drove fast across the city. She'd heard how slurred her speech was as she whispered 'it's nothing', and she'd been… scared.

It wasn't a feeling she was very used to.

Now Jo was sleeping, and Sherlock was watching her sleep, the way she did almost every night since they'd begun sharing a bed, in early June, just as the weather really began to warm up – but that hadn't seemed to bother them: they'd slept embracing each other that entire first month. They fell asleep hugging, then, until Sherlock woke up in the middle of the night, and saw that they'd drifted a bit apart, so she immediately closed the distance again.

They didn't hug all night, every night anymore, but most nights they did, at least just before falling asleep and early in the morning, to keep each other warm, maybe, since it was December, but also because it made Sherlock feel good, in a way she hadn't experienced since her brief, fleeting months with Victoria, and perhaps not even then. She still disliked sleeping, still had a hard time falling asleep, still wished she could skip the nights altogether, but now a tiny part of her was looking forward to them, too.

She fell asleep thinking about that – thinking about the warmth of the smaller body in her arms – and lost track of a few hours; when she awoke, Joanna was looking at her.

"You should sleep," Sherlock told her.

"The doctor just came to wake me up."

"Yes, you can sleep now," Sherlock replied, annoyed that she hadn't been able to hear him. She took pride in being a light sleeper. "It's five."

"Come here," Joanna said.

Sherlock knew she should have looked around to check for anyone who could see them, because they were celebrities now, albeit on a very small scale, and in a very strange way; but the thought crossed her mind, almost sent by God himself, that Joanna wouldn't have appreciated that. And perhaps, only perhaps, Sherlock had actually been waiting to hear those words: maybe she actually wanted to climb onto the hospital bed and hug her.

The bed was wide and they were both narrow enough; Sherlock wrapped one arm around Joanna's stomach, then slipped the other one underneath her waist, between her warm body and the mattress. Then she laid her head somewhere between Joanna's face, her collarbone, and the pillow. One side of her face was pressed against the mattress, and she said nothing.

"You looked so scared," Jo began. Sherlock didn't stop her. "I was unnecessarily harsh, in the car, earlier," she said.

Sherlock was taken aback, because she wasn't expecting her to bring it up again.

"I hope you realized it wasn't just about the play," she continued.

Sherlock had known, once, but she'd deleted the information to make room for something else, she guessed.

"Then why…"

"If you still don't get it, I don't know what to tell you," Joanna replied. She could her from her tone that she'd lost her patience and she was at a loss.

"It's just theatre. You don't even like it. It will be boring and I'll use my phone the whole time, and you'll get angry. Why do you want to do this?"

"It's not about the play itself," Joanna replied. "I don't give a shit about the play, Sherlock, just like you don't – I don't even know what it's about. The Iliad, I guess."

"And you want to be my plus one."

"Well, yes."

"Even if you don't care."

"Sherlock, you're not that naive. No one can be that naive. You know exactly what I'm asking you."

"You want to make our liaison public."

"Who the hell even calls it that?" Joanna said in lieu of an answer.

"But you do," Sherlock said.

"Yes. We've been living together for two years, we've been sleeping in the same bed for six months, and we're planning to keep it that way – or are you not? I feel like that's not too much to ask."

"But we're…"

"Both women," Joanna said. "And B rank celebrities, I know that. I know." It was unusually direct, coming from her. "I would like to come clean," she began, carefully. "But you have to be on board. I don't want people to think I'm forcing you – because of your parents' money, or because you're the consulting detective. You must understand, Sherlock…"

"I'm not really understanding anything right now."

"I don't want them to think that I'm living off you," she whispered. Sherlock didn't really see how all those things were related – she would have been more than happy to cover for her half of the rent, if the need should arise, but it had never been necessary, because she had a job and she certainly wasn't living off Sherlock, of all people.

"Off your money and your fame," she repeated, as if it weren't clear enough. "But I know I have no right to ask you…"

"No," Sherlock said, "you don't."

It sounded harsh, and sudden and brutal, like a stone being dropped on the floor.

"Let's not ruin this," Joanna said. She closed her eyes. "I don't want to force you and I don't want this to be an ultimatum. I'm willing to do this for you. You have to think this through, carefully. Your parents, the trust fund…"

"They wouldn't take it away because of this; they already haven't. If you weren't so agreeable, perhaps. They tried, in the past, but not for that." She was starting to speak fast, and not too coherently.

"I don't think I want to know. I don't want to ruin this. Forget it. Sleep."

Sherlock thought that it didn't really make sense for them to sleep like this, hugging each other even though they were mad at each other, or at least Joanna was mad at her – Sherlock was mad at herself, too. She didn't even try to close her eyes.

Earlier that night, as he microwaved some expired ramen he'd found in the cupboard, possibly another relic from his divorce, Lestrade remembered the look on Sherlock's face upon hearing the admittedly scary thud of the doctor's head against the radiator.

It would have been a lie to say that he'd never seen Sherlock Holmes in any kind of distress: he'd seen her at the pool, and he'd seen her almost overdose, and he'd tried to restrict her access to crime scenes often enough that he knew what she looked like when she was upset, or when she was pretending to be for manipulatory purposes.

This time, it had not been manipulatory – that much he knew.

Every single time it had happened – every single other time, she'd been concerned about her own interest: her own life, at the pool, her own respiratory system, when it had been on the brink of failing her, her own job and source of livelihood, both financial and emotional. But today, it had been about the doctor, and the doctor alone: the way she'd supported her head, checked for wounds in Joanna's dishwater blonde hair; the way those words – iI'm sorry/i – had come out of her mouth for possibly the first time since Lestrade had met her, seven years ago, when she was a recent Natural Sciences dropout with too much money and no perspectives whatsoever.

For definitely not the first time, a thought crossed his head – admittedly unsupported by any kind of evidence: he simply could not imagine Sherlock Holmes in a relationship with anyone, man or woman. Even the tabloids never went past 'gal pals', although they'd gone to impressive lengths to demonstrate a relationship between Joanna and some handsome dermatologist who worked at her surgery. Sherlock had laughed when Lestrade had asked her for clarification.

And he was still hoping that she'd invite her sister.

He came back to the scene four days later, at Sherlock's insistence, because she hadn't been able to properly analyze it the first time, with Joanna nearly giving herself brain damage and all. He'd had to keep her waiting – he'd had a robbery gone wrong in the meantime, which had been easy and tedious and more gruesome than usual. He'd received an email from his lawyer, which he'd ignored He'd spent

"How is she?" Lestrade asked, politely, as soon as the consulting detective arrived from the cab parked outside, making her way through the police tape with her usual confidence.

"She has a slight concussion," she replied. "They kept her the first night, but now she's home."

"Oh shit," Lestrade said, mostly because it sounded like an insurance nightmare, but also because the short doctor had grown on him: she minded her own business, and kept to her own most of the time, but she also had some manners, unlike her flatmate. On top of it all, she was a very practical person, which was a quality the Detective Inspector quite liked.

"Don't worry about the insurance – we told them she'd fallen from the kitchen counter at home. She always stands on the bloody thing when she's trying to reach the high shelves, so it's bound to happen someday, really. I always tell her not to…"

"Now she won't, after yesterday's scare," Lestrade said, not really sure of where Sherlock was going.

"I watched her all night, sorry I couldn't make it sooner," at which point Lestrade found himself even more confused, because he knew Sherlock rarely woke up before ten when she wasn't occupied with a big case, and when she was, she just bypassed the sleeping part altogether. And no matter how late or early she arrived, she never apologized for it.

"…but I had to wait for Mrs Hudson to come back from the shops to keep an eye on her at Baker Street. She's not nauseous, and she insists she's fine, but the doctors weren't as thorough as I hoped, even though I've complained and threatened to call my sister, but they have determined that her skull isn't fractured and there are no haemorrhages and…"

"Sherlock," Lestrade interjected, suddenly moved by the consultant's display of concern and also confused about his own feeling moved. "Relax. She's a doctor, she knows what's up. She'll be fine."

"Anyway, Mrs Hudson has to leave for her board games at three, so we must hurry up," Sherlock said, and crossed the room with just two long strides; then she stopped in front of the window, turned back on her heels, and walked back to Lestrade.

"It's going to be alright," he told her, feeling very fatherly, even though he had no children (he and Sophie had tried, but they just hadn't come) and even though Sherlock was only ten years his junior.

The moment was, however, ruined by the loud notes of some kind of music, religious, upon further analysis, blasting from an old radio that was sitting on a table in the living room, together with large scissors and a sewing machine.

Lestrade dropped the badge he was still holding. Sherlock's ears became bright red.

"Can you turn the fucking thing down, Anderson?" she shouted.

"It was already this loud!" the detective complained. "Grandma must have become a bit deaf."

Lestrade was fully expecting Sherlock to escalate it – to say nasty things about Mrs Anderson and her profession, and he was fully prepared to physically stop either of them, if needed. But then Sherlock's ears turned back to their original colour, and her lips, already ajar, ready to spit fire, closed again on her teeth.

"She used the sewing machine a lot," she stated, as if it were evident, which it must have been, to her, at least, "and she listened to the radio while she did."

"It was the Catholic channel," Anderson supplied, "my mum listens to that all the time."

Miraculously, Sherlock didn't take the bait – he said nothing at all about Mrs Anderson. The Detective Inspector couldn't believe his luck.

"Always at this volume…"

"You mean that someone killed an old lady because she listened to the Catholic channel so loud?" Lestrade formulated, mostly in disbelief.

"Wouldn't be unheard of," he replied.

Then, they drove back to Scotland Yard, because someone had finally managed to contact Michel Parris, the architect son.

He sounded horrified, when they told him about his mother's fate; to Lestrade's relief, he had an airtight alibi, and, as Sherlock had already told them, no good reason to want his mother dead. Sherlock was there, too, in her usual chair in the questioning room. How on Earth they managed to sneak her in every time, Lestrade would never figure it out, and hoped he'd never have to.

"We weren't very close," Parris told them, unprompted, "but she was a darling, in her own way."

"You left home when you were twenty-two," Sherlock said, a bit more bluntly than Lestrade would have. "Why?"

"I ran away, married a girl, went to uni. After I graduated I came back, and she forgave me. I paid her rent every month," he added.

"You visited often?" Lestrade asked.

The man looked pained. Lestrade thought he understood.

"Not as often as I should've, after my father died," he replied after a while, which Lestrade knew was a lie, because the neighbours had told him otherwise. "I live in the North, you know…"

"So someone else had the keys, for emergencies," Sherlock suggested, and the man nodded.

"Mr Brown from downstairs," Parris said, "he is such a dear, always drives my mum to doctor's appointments, and she does his laundry and irons his clothes."

iDrove/i, Lestrade thought, and idid/i, and iironed/i.

"And he just had a kid, didn't he?"

The man looked surprised. "Yes," he said. "In August. Did you hear him cry?"

And then Sherlock was gone – to Lestrade's car, presumably.

It was, in fact, Mr Brown from downstairs.

"All the children, crying," Sherlock told him as they took him to the Yard for questioning, although he'd just pretty much confessed: he'd opened the door late at night, using his keys, because the old lady had started sewing again, and the machine was so old and so loud, and as if that weren't enough, she'd turned on the fucking radio, and he'd heard the first two notes of the Hail Mary and his light had just gone out. He had a baby, for God's sake, and she was a fussy sleeper, and she woke up every time the old bitch turned on the Catholic channel on the radio. You know, a man can try, but enough is enough, he kept saying, eyes on Lestrade, looking for his understanding, maybe, which he certainly could not give: he'd never had a newborn, or homicidal thoughts. Not seriously, although with Sherlock he'd sure as hell been close.

He got that feeling again – the one he got quite often, given the nature of his job: that human beings did terrible things for reasons that were ultimately futile, because they were ultimately selfish beings, that nothing was ever noble and there was no higher purpose whatsoever. The feeling had found him more than once, during his career, although it had been more frequent at first, and now after the divorce it'd come back in full force: how can people really love each other, when they'll strangle an old lady because she was listening to the Hail Mary at the radio?

"Disappointing," Sherlock said instead. She was not familiar with that feeling, Lestrade figured. "I really hoped there had been someone living in that ceiling."

"Whoever it was, an old woman's still dead," Lestrade reminded her, trying to think about what Joanna would've said.

"Oh no," Sherlock said, "what time is it?"

"Half past," Lestrade replied.

"Half past what?"

"Half past four." It had been a long day.

"She's home alone!" Sherlock shouted. "Mrs Hudson can't skip this tournament. She's up against Mrs Coulton." Which was apparently a big deal.

"I can drive you there," Lestrade said, partly because he felt the need to leave the premise for a bit, but also because he still wanted to know whether Sherlock would invite her sister as a plus one.

"You really want Mycroft there, don't you?" Sherlock said like clockwork, as soon as she fastened her belt in the passenger seat.

He could only sigh.

"I think she'd like you – she likes them ruggedly handsome and grey, and every single man she's dated loved football." Which wasn't exactly a compliment, but it came very close to being one.

"So you'll take her?"

"Perhaps," Sherlock said. "Can you stop at the chemist? I have to get something for Joanna."

And that's how Lestrade ended up at the chemist counter together with Sherlock Holmes, who was buying a box of pads and some painkillers.

"I told her to call if she feels even a bit nauseated," he told Lestrade, "she has your number, too, just in case, and…"

"She'll be fine," Lestrade said again.

"What if she got a haemorrhage, and the doctors didn't see it? What if her skull's actually cracked? iI/i took her to that crime scene and iI/i forced her to climb that chair." Which was something she'd thought often, but never said out loud, in the past few days, that she'd spent at home, playing Joanna's favourite tunes at the violin and staring at her from afar. Their relationship, already such a delicate affair, had never felt so much like walking on eggshells. What if she'd given her brain damage. What if she left while she was on the crime scene.

"She's not two years old!" Lestrade replied. "You didn't force her to do anything. She doesn't look like the type of person who lets other people force her to do anything."

Once again proving that something extraordinary was going on, Sherlock didn't say anything else. Lestrade drove in silence another five minutes, mostly spent waiting in traffic.

"Who's going to be your plus one? You're not getting back with Sophie by next week."

"No," Lestrade snapped, "I'm not. Thanks for reminding me."

"Well, since Donovan has that terrible boyfriend, and she got her own invite, anyway, she must have, or it would be a scandal, she was much more useful than you, on that case…"

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. You could bring your mum."

"What?"

It truly took him by surprise, mostly because it was so obvious, and had been all along – gone were the days of teenage rebellion: it was no longer uncool to bring your own parents to social events. Rather, it had become honourable – and Margaret would have enjoyed it, too.

"You mentioned that she likes theatre, sometimes," Sherlock said, and Lestrade didn't remember ever saying anything like that, which meant that it had to have happened years before, and Sherlock's incredible memory had just stored the information somewhere, in some obscure drawer in the wing of her mind palace that was dedicated to the police force and maybe, hopefully, to him specifically.

He dropped her off in front of Baker Street, where Joanna was waiting for them at the window, holding a cup of tea. She waved Lestrade hi from there, as Sherlock almost ran to the door. He'd never seen her run anywhere, except for crime scenes, or after suspects. Was the unbreakable Sherlock Holmes faltering?

It was already dark when Sherlock got home.

"Was it the neighbour?" Joanna asked. "Is it solved finally? You were driving me insane. Why was Lestrade so busy, again?"

"Robbery gone wrong," Sherlock said. "Should've taken less than four days, really."

Joanna was on the sofa, on her side, to avoid the unpleasant rubbing of the fabric against the stitched side of her head. The wound was small and she'd covered it with hair easily. Sherlock wanted to sit next to her, but she didn't quite dare. She was feeling better, Sherlock could tell, and she even made her some tea, without milk because she'd forgotten to buy it – as punishment for that, maybe.

"You're supposed to say thank you," Joanna said.

"It was Mr Brown from downstairs," Sherlock told her instead.

"Are we sure?"

"Reasonably," Sherlock said, although Joanna knew not to trust anything less than a 'yes'.

Joanna sat down on the sofa, legs crossed in front of her and hot cup on her knee.

"Before, at the hospital," she began, "you told me something about your parents."

Sherlock considered pretending that she didn't remember what she'd said, but she knew that Joanna would see through it. "They'd find you agreeable," she confirmed. "You have good manners and you are attractive. These are the only two criteria they apply to people. Other than class, but they'd make an exception."

"Thanks, I guess," Jo replied. "Actually, I meant…"

"What else did I say about them?" Sherlock asked, because she disliked talking about them and she knew it.

"That they already haven't… taken your trust fund away, because you're… you know," she said, gesturing at the two of them.

Sherlock sat down next to her, hugging her knees, face buried between them.

"So you came out," Jo said, because, really, it wasn't a hard deduction at all.

"Yes," came from between Sherlock's knees.

"Oh. How did it… go?"

Sherlock didn't reply. It hadn't gone iterribly/i, to be perfectly honest. They hadn't kicker her out, or chased her with a shovel, the way Victoria's father had, or the way some of the Irregulars' parents had. They hadn't hit her or called her names or anything, and they'd never done that on any other occasion. They were in fact pretty normal people, just not very loving. Everyone seemed to want to find something truly awful in Sherlock Holmes's past, some great big trauma to justify the person she was. The truth was that there had been no such thing: they might not have been very loving, but nothing had, strictly speaking, happened. Actually, that was exactly the point.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," Joanna told her, since she was not answering.

"No, no, it's… not that." Sherlock straightened her legs in front of her. They were slender and long and her parents had tried to force her to do ballet. She could hear her heartbeat in her eardrums and her mouth was very dry. "They didn't take it well," she said after a while.

"Oh," Jo replied. "I gathered, yes."

"They didn't disown me or anything – not after everything else I've done, but… they said it would pass. That I was confused, as if I hadn't known since I was twelve… I think…" Sherlock stretched her feet, en pointe, they would have called it, because her parents had tried to sign her up for ballet classes, since she had the long legs and neck and arms that her sister hadn't inherited. Except that it was nearly impossible to force Sherlock to do something she didn't want to, even as a child, and therefore she'd never actually got to dance en pointe. "I think they were already disappointed enough. In me."

"You were a child genius," Jo pointed out, which was another easy deduction, even though Sherlock had never told her so.

"So was Mycroft," she pointed out. "Actually, I think they wanted another Mycroft – they wanted a boy, but another Mycroft would have worked too – and got me instead." She drew a circle in the air as she spoke, quickly, as she always did when she was nervous.

Joanna had a different look on her face than Sherlock was expecting. It was no longer an 'I'm sorry' face. "I don't understand. Do you want to be a Mycroft?"

"God, no!" Sherlock nearly shouted.

"Then why…?"

"Mycroft was an athlete, could do makeup, did extra curricular activities, had a lot of friends, and… he pleased people," she said with something that sounded a lot like disgust.

"Yes, and you're you," Jo said.

"That's the point!" Sherlock said, raising her hands, then she got up.

"That's not a bad thing," Joanna replied, an exaggerated look of confusion on her face, which meant that she wasn't confused at all.

"Well, thank you, but I think you're the only one in the world who would say such a thing."

"Me and our clients," she pointed out. "And Lestrade. And the Yard, and Mrs Hudson…"

"I leave bullet holes on the walls, Joanna."

"Well, that's too bad, because I fell in love with you, and certainly not with Mycr…"

She stopped in her tracks, and it took Sherlock a moment before she, too, realized the implications of what she had said.

"You…"

"Yes!" Joanna said, with such intensity that someone who didn't know her well would have seen her as hostile. "You're everything I never bloody expected."

"I don't think I deserve you," Sherlock replied, in earnest.

"Clichés don't suit you," Jo said. "I love you. It doesn't matter if you deserve it or not, 'cause I do."

So Sherlock just leaned forward and kissed her – it was an awkward angle, and she was still holding the hot cup, but it felt more like the first kiss they'd shared than any other kiss they'd had since that day in June.

They ordered Chinese and Joanna finally ate her entire portion. Sherlock did, too. The last few days they'd slept together – the way they'd done at the hospital: coldly. The first night had been awkward, without the urgency, the sense of being in a situation that's out of the ordinary, that the setting had given them there. The talk they'd had in the car, the one they'd had in the hospital bed, was heavy between them. The first night they hadn't even hugged before sleeping.

Sherlock knew she wasn't supposed to do it, but she always counted all the times in a week they slept hugging, mentally measured the distance between their bodies on the bed. She knew it was supposed to come naturally, but she felt the need to quantify it. The past three nights they'd slept further apart and had hugged only briefly; there hadn't been any sex.

She tried to find something to say to reply to what Joanna had told her.

"It's fine if you don't feel like saying it, or not yet," Joanna told her after the weather forecast. "I understand."

Sherlock had never been good with feelings; quite the opposite. Victoria had told her that she had a tendency to make everything about herself, and she knew that she dealt with difficult situations through long silences and sleepless nights, the way Joanna dealt with them through sex: she'd heard her fall into that same old trap, once or twice, while trying to break up with the woman of the month.

So she took her by the hand and led her to their bed.

Sherlock's suggestion had shaken the DI to his core, so he decided to call his brother Robert.

This wasn't something he did very often – they almost never talked, these days. Robert, too, lived in London, where he'd made a small fortune with a used car dealership. He had a beautiful wife and three children, a son and two daughters. Despite Lestrade's best efforts, his brother's success in life only reminded him of his own failures; which was why he hadn't called him since the day Sophie had filed for divorce.

"Any news?" Robert asked him straight away. "Has it been finalized yet?"

"We need to wait some more," Lestrade replied, already regretting the call.

"What's going on in your life, Greg? Has something happened with that private detective of yours?" he asked him, because he, too, was deeply convinced that he and Sherlock were definitely meant to be.

"No, and I don't think it ever will," he replied. "Remember the big case with the theatre?"

"Yeah, must have seen it on the news. You were behind it, right?"

"Yeah, with a coworker," Lestrade wondered what he was waiting for to break the news. "We've been given tickets to a premiere. Racine. As a reward, and as an official visit. And I get a plus one," he added, finally clarifying the matter at hand.

"Can't bring Sophie, I reckon," his brother said, furtherly twisting the knife.

"Yeah, don't think I'll do that. But," and then Lestrade paused, as it was a sore subject for both, "Mum likes French stuff, doesn't she?"

Robert didn't say anything for a bit, then from his voice alone Lestrade could see him light up, from his home, maybe, or his office at the dealership.

"Yeah, she likes it a lot," Robert said.

Then they spoke of Lestrade's nephew and nieces. They spoke about a dinner at an Italian restaurant they both liked, and even set a date. With mum, they agreed. She must want to see the kids more often. They didn't say 'I miss you', but it was definitely there.

The cold lasted until one morning, three days before the play.

Joanna woke up early to go to the surgery and found an envelope on the kitchen table. Sherlock was still asleep, in bed. She'd had to learn to get ready without making too much noise, in the morning, when she had to work and Sherlock was not on a case, because those were the rare times she actually got some sleep, and Joanna didn't want to disturb it. So she picked out her clothes the night before. She enjoyed it. Despite the cold.

As she sipped on her usual coffee – a necessity for early morning shifts – she opened the envelope, which was blank, although she knew that it could only come from two people, and Mrs Hudson usually preferred to talk.

It wasn't thick. She broke the seal with a knife; inside was the ticket for the play. There was no note.

She mentioned it first thing after the shift; Sherlock was reading some scientific papers on the sofa in front of the telly – she had no trouble focusing even with loud noises.

"I found the envelope," she told her.

"I thought you wanted to come even if it sounds boring," Sherlock replied candidly.

"We'll go there as…"

"A couple. There will be photographers; we'll leave no room for doubts."

"So," Joanna started, hanging her coat and sitting down on the sofa, in the space between her legs that was meant for her, "you've thought this through?"

"It was not a hard one," Sherlock said. "I want to be with you." It felt really urgent, like it couldn't even wait for the telly to stop screaming an obnoxious song. "I… want to be with you, whatever it takes," she said.

"I don't want to force you with blackmail, or…"

"You're not," she said. "I'm doing this because I want to. I want to hold your hand in the street without tabloids calling us gal pals…"

Joanna closed her eyes and let out a small laugh.

"...I want you to meet my mother and father, eventually, and I think they'd like you more than they like me. I want to work on another few hundred cases with you, then retire to the countryside with you and then we'll do something relaxing, like beekeeping, even though you're…"

"I'm…"

"...afraid of bees," Sherlock finished. She was speaking fast, again.

Joanna's eyes were still closed. She peeked out from the right one, which had an unusual glisten in it, although it wasn't quite wet – Sherlock had never seen her cry. "You're making me cry, you idiot," she said, then, after a short struggle with the sofa, Sherlock's legs, and her jeans, she laid on top of her and buried her head in Sherlock's chest.

"We'll go there," Sherlock said, "as a couple, and…"

"It's not just the public image," Jo interrupted her. "Think about everyone else you know. The Yard, your…"

"Your coworkers."

"They know." Joanna scooped closer. "Your family?" she enquired. "There will be no coming back. They can't ignore it this time." Sherlock doubted that.

"They've had long enough to deal with it," she said anyway.

The next day, Joanna took her dress shopping.

Which was humiliating enough, Sherlock thought.

"You can't wear your normal clothes," she explained, "there will be press. Dress or slacks? What colour?"

Sherlock had no clue and she liked the idea of Joanna choosing. She ended up dropping a light blue dress in her arms, that Sherlock ended up trying on and actually liking, and paying with Mycroft's credit card.

Afterwards they went to a new restaurant – Indian, spicy, the way Joanna liked it. Sherlock, not so much, but she didn't mention it. They hadn't eaten out in quite some time. Since their thing had begun, a new awareness had dawned on them. Things that had never bothered them before now felt like concerns. Just like guilty men, who act unusually alarmed even when the situation wouldn't otherwise warrant it, because they are guilty as sin.

They dined at home more often, which was probably good for their health and finances, anyway, and when they ate out they always tried new places, always secluded, in quiet parts of the city and quiet hours of the day, and they still managed to get photographed sometimes. They held hands, sometimes, over the table, they didn't say no to the candles and they called them dates; it was just a matter of luck if the tabloids hadn't figured that one yet, or voluntary blindness.

They walked home in the streets, lit by the streetlights and the tacky Christmas decor. Joanna liked Christmas. Sherlock was going to buy her a new jumper as a present – red, because she liked the way it looked on her. They held hands and didn't speak much, but it wasn't an awkward silence. Soon they wouldn't need to scan the crowds for cameras anymore – they still would, but not every time they held hands, she figured.

When the night finally came, Lestrade spent an ungodly amount of time in front of the mirror, checking his tie, his hair – blow dried as usual, but combed with a lot more strength, – the fit of his jacket, then finally his shirt, which he'd worn at his own wedding and at his father's funeral, so it didn't exactly carry a lot of good memories. It had also grown quite tight around his belly. Once he was done, his mother still walked out of the bathroom, all dressed up in what must have been a very fancy dress for someone her age, and fixed his tie again. Just in case.

She'd carried the fancy dress in a small suitcase, when he'd driven all the way from her flat in the South to his own in London. He'd slept at her place, after arriving for dinner the previous day, after work. There, he'd found a very excited Margaret – the way Lestrade remembered being in primary school, the nights before school trips.

They'd agreed that she'd stay the rest of the weekend, and then Lestrade had taken the Monday off to stay with her some more, offer her a nice meal, and drive her back. And she would come back for Christmas, too, after less than ten days – they'd have a big lunch at Robert's house, and they'd see their nieces and nephews and grandkids, and they'd be a family, which wasn't such a big thing, all things considered – no one hated each other, after all – but to Lestrade it might as well have been.

After Margaret was ready, Lestrade stepped into his shoes and called a cab, because, official visit or not, it was insanely difficult to park near the most obnoxious theatre in all of London, and he didn't want to make Margaret walk too far.

The cab left them right in front of the entrance, so he paid and his mother thanked the driver no less than five times, and then she took his arm and they walked to the door, with a certain gravitas, Lestrade thought, as if they were entering a temple, the society of London's strangest, and then his heart almost skipped a beat: Mycroft Lestrade was standing on the pavement, in a black suit and pumps, holding a black umbrella, a black bag slung over her right shoulder, and suddenly Lestrade could feel his back become a bit straighter, his head held a bit higher. He could feel that his mother felt it, too.

"Introduce me to your friends!" she shouted, so loud that Mycroft must have heard her. "Is she the consultant you always work with?" And she smirked, because ever since the very first time Lestrade had clarified that Sherlock was in fact a girl's name, his mother had been convinced that they were going to eventually get married, even though Lestrade himself was already married at the time. Then again, his mother never really liked Sophie.

"I'm afraid the consulting detective is my sister," Mycroft replied, polite as always, holding out a hand for Lestrade's mother to shake.

"So you're Sherlock's plus one?" Lestrade asked, slightly in awe of his own luck.

"I could never," Mycroft replied. "I bought the tickets ten months ago."

iOh./i

"You're into theatre, then!" his mother replied in lieu.

"I'd say so," Mycroft replied, "unlike my poor sister. I hope she'll behave herself. And that she won't be too late," she added, and then a familiar blue car passed them.

iOh./i

And sure enough, Sherlock appeared from around the corner five short minutes later – they'd somehow managed to park, Lestrade figured, because behind her, in a red dress and high heels, hair down and bright lipstick, came the doctor, looking embarrassed, but not too uncomfortable about the whole thing. And Sherlock and Joanna were holding hands.

"How the tables have turned!" Mycroft commented, as her sister approached. It took him a bit to see why: she was wearing a dress. A plain blue one, with silver ballet shoes, no heels.

"The pants suit you better, and that shirt, with your breasts…" Sherlock was about to reply.

"You look great!" the doctor said, quick enough to almost cover Sherlock's comment. She looked like she was in a hurry to join them, someone she knew among London's best.

"And you must be Mrs Lestrade?" Jo asked, holding out her right hand to Margaret.

"His mother, I'm afraid," his mother replied, smiling wide.

"Joanna Watson," she said, "I'm Sherlock's partner. Surely he must have told you about her." Lestrade was hit with the realization of the word choice – ipartner/i. They were standing close to each other, although they were no longer holding hands, Joanna noticeably more relaxed than Sherlock.

"Of course he has, my boy. She's saved him so many times! And call me Margaret, please," his mother replied, "or, even better, Maggie."

"Jo, then."

"You're here with your friend?" his mother was asking, when Lestrade sensed the danger, and felt the need to intervene.

"I figured you'd be her plus one!"

As if it helped.

"False," Sherlock deadpanned. "You were hoping I'd bring my sister."

"But she bought the tickets like, forever ago, because she loves Racine," Joanna continued, then smiled. And then a truly wonderful thing happened – Sherlock looked at her, and then she smiled, too, and something in her face mellowed, that Lestrade couldn't quite identify.

And those were all the words they managed to exchange before the time came to sit down and perform the boring rituals – and Sherlock performed them perfectly, to Lestrade's amazement: she followed every nudge, every glance the doctor shot her; she didn't say a syllable more than necessary, but she seemed very charming. The blue brought out the black in her short hair, and the grey in her eyes; Joanna brought out the softness in her features.

Mycroft was only one row behind them; she must have bought some really good tickets. She, too, stared at her own sister in amazement as she greeted their benefactor and his wife. She stared at the doctor too, with disbelief, mostly, and maybe something that resembled pride.

The piece was long and strange, and Lestrade had to shake himself awake twice, but his mother really loved it and it was all that mattered, he figured. Donovan was enthusiastic, because she was the kind of person who had the intellectual tools to actually understand theatre. Lestrade knew he didn't.

And afterwards they had to greet a lot of people again – important people, who were also there officially, as opposed to recreationally. After the last one, who even kissed Margaret's hand, like in some kind of twenty-first century Downton Abbey, and took her to the director, to greet him, Lestrade supposed, Mycroft appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in front of them.

"Was it… a nice play?" Lestrade asked her. He felt very stupid.

"Enjoyable, but not so great for a first timer, I'm afraid."

She took him by the arm, guided him to the side of the hall, away from the crowd of the elite.

"I know you asked my sister if I was going to come," Mycroft told him.

Lestrade suddenly wished for the floor to open underneath him, and swallow him whole, like the statue of Don Juan, maybe. He wasn't sure.

"You hadn't realized… my sister's inclinations," she continued, and ioh/i. That was not going the way the Detective Inspector had imagined.

"No," he said, and laughed, half nervously and half relieved.

"Surprising. She seems to think that everyone knows at first glance."

"I thought they were just roommates."

"Oh, they were, at least at first," and then Lestrade remembered the dinner he'd offered and that Joanna had refused, and suddenly felt his ears go red.

"It's not a secret," Mycroft stated, "although she doesn't exactly publicize it, now that she's famous." And, Lestrade thought, it wasn't a very well kept one, to be honest, thinking about it.

"But they'll be on the papers tomorrow," Lestrade pointed out.

"They'll be on live television tonight, and our parents won't miss a Racine premiere," she corrected him. "I think she's ready," she added then. "Surely she must have realized what it meant. To take Joanna here."

He nodded.

"The first time… it was perhaps the last straw, between her and our parents," she told him. "Then she dropped out, and I'm afraid you know the rest."

"That sounds terrible," Lestrade said, because it did.

"It was the first time I've ever openly gone against them."

She was smiling now, mindlessly caressing the leather of her black purse.

"And now?" Lestrade asked.

"Who knows," Mycroft replied, an exaggerated tilt of her head towards the ceiling. "It was their problem, not mine, and certainly not Sherlock's."

iWhy are you offering me all this information,/i was what he wanted to ask instead.

"You've been such a good influence on her life, before Joanna came along. She cares a lot about you, even though she does her best to hide it."

And Lestrade foolishly hoped that she wasn't only there to tell him that he was such a good friend to her gay sister, and that she was grateful for it. No matter how nice it felt, and how it was tugging at his heartstrings to hear it.

"You seem like a good man," Mycroft was concluding.

"Would you… would you like to get dinner, sometimes?" he managed to spit out, so fast that he almost interrupted her, ears turning red because it had been a while since he'd last done that – dating – however it worked. He didn't actually think he'd do it, until he did it. He did it because he felt like he had nothing to lose, because he had a suspicion that the Holmes sisters were always ten steps ahead of him, anyway, and they never did anything just because.

"I thought you'd never ask, Gregory," Mycroft said, then pulled out a planner from her black handbag.

"Where do you think you're going?" a voice interrupted them from the crowd, as Lestrade hit the save button on the new contact he'd just added to his phone, under the name Mycroft Holmes. As if he knew any other Mycrofts.

Sherlock was on the run – already in the hall, ballet flats clattering loudly; Jo stood at the entrance, looking at her flatmate – girlfriend, Lestrade corrected himself – the way a mother looks at a rebellious child.

"To the old lady's house!" Sherlock replied, as if it were completely obvious.

"And how are you planning to get there?" Joanna replied, and underneath her light makeup, so clearly applied by someone else, Lestrade rejoiced in seeing Sherlock Holmes blush.

Treading lightly even on high heels – was she even supposed to drive in those? – Joanna reached her girlfriend, took out her car keys from her impossibly small handbag, and together, hand in hand, they walked to the blue car, Sherlock taller than Jo, even with her ballet flats. Lestrade was touched, really.

"Follow them," Mycroft said, "I'm afraid you must," and then, "I'll take care of Mrs Lestrade. I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about. Just give her the keys, since you'll most likely be late."

So Lestrade ran after the two to the battered car, parked in a small street he had never even seen in his life. He knew Sherlock got to sit in the front, as some kind of divine right, as the driver's flatmate – and girlfriend, he thought, again. The car only had front doors and he had to climb to the backseat.

"So," Joanna breached the subject first, or maybe she just said it to break the silence. Lestrade felt the urgent need to stick his foot in his mouth anyway.

"I… would've never guessed," Lestrade said. "Congratulations," he quickly added.

"Thanks," Joanna said, and laughed, perhaps nervously, but the car wasn't completely awkward.

"Seriously? Mycroft knew I was gay years before I even knew what it meant," Sherlock said, and once again Lestrade thought of all the signs – the lack of male companions, the way she'd seemed uninterested towards the few Yard officers who had tried to make a move on her… Lestrade had assumed she must have been some kind of inanimate object, devoid of feelings, of personal relationships – and then realized how unnecessarily complicated that was, how… simple the truth.

"With the short hair. And all…"

Sherlock was rambling. "People don't usually guess it about me, though," Joanna said, after a while. "Most of the time, with my exes, people assumed we were sisters, or just close friends."

"Well, we most definitely aren't. Sisters, I mean," Sherlock said, "I guess you're a very close friend, as well. All the pages I've consulted say that being friends already greatly helps with…"

After a minute or so, DI Lestrade had to remind himself to close his mouth. They stopped at the Yard, for Lestrade to pick up the keys, while the two women waited for him in the car.

"Here we are," Jo said, parking the old car in front of the estate. "It's quite late," she said.

"It'll be quick."

"What's this about?" Lestrade asked, praying to the gods, for his own sake but also for Sherlock's, that it was something serious, because he'd been about to ask Mycroft out on a date.

"Yes, she wants to go out with you. Just text her and ask, or she'll do it first."

Sherlock was almost running to the entrance, Joanna struggling to keep up in her heels. "Let her run. It's not like she has the keys."

Lestrade grinned. "How long have you two…?"

Jo smiled. "Six months," she said, which was less than Lestrade expected. "She knew I was… gay, and I knew she knew, and that she was also like that, but I thought she just… wasn't interested. In dating, and in me."

"I think… had I known… there was no doubt she was interested in you," Lestrads said. "When you got hurt, on the scene, we all got scared, of course, but she… I'd never seen her like that before."

"Remember the Garrideb case," Joanna said. "When that bullet grazed me. That's when… it happened."

"Can't imagine," Lestrade said.

"It was something," she agreed.

Sherlock was waiting for them by the door, that Lestrade opened, struggling to find the hole in the dark hallway.

"What?" he asked, as Sherlock looked around.

"The crawlspace," she just said. "When we last checked it, I… wasn't thinking clearly. I'll climb there, this time."

She dragged the same chair she'd told Joanna to use, then climbed on top of it; she was taller than the other woman, and could reach the space just fine.

"Careful," Joanna said.

"It's just a spider," she replied.

"What's in there?" Lestrade asked.

Sherlock didn't reply – they heard her fumble with something in the crawlspace for a few seconds, then she came down from the chair, carefully, holding a bundle in her arms. It was covered with an old blanket, and not as dusty as it should have been, which was so obvious even Lestrade could tell.

"Family albums?" he asked, in disbelief, as Sherlock removed the blanket and set it aside.

"Letters," Sherlock simply replied. "They were hidden by the blanket. Some have been taken. But there were too many for whoever did it."

"Whose letters are they?" Joanna asked.

"They're old," Lestrade pointed out.

Joanen picked up one, holding it carefully from one corner.

_iDear Harry,/i_ it began.

"It wasn't the dead husband's name, right?"

"No," Lestrade said, "he was called Albert."

"She'd been cheating," Jo stated. "Since…"

"1958 at least," Sherlock said.

"But the architect son was only born in 1960," Joanna pointed out.

"iThis guy/i is the architect's true father?" Lestrade let out.

"Irrelevant." Sherlock was scanning each letter, setting all of them aside on top of the blanket. "Someone saw these, and didn't like it."

"Either the husband's not really dead…"

"That almost never happens, Jo," Sherlock interrupted her, and Lestrade noticed that there wasn't any disdain in her voice, like there would've been if a Yard officer had said the same thing.

"...the son, then?"

"Maybe he was close to his father," Lestrade realized.

"And he had no idea?"

"Apparently," Sherlock said.

"My great uncle did something similar, and they only knew because when he was seventy-five, he left my great aunt to move in with his friend from tennis. They'd been together for twenty years," Joanna supplied.

"That's insane," Lestrade agreed.

"We need to talk to the son," Sherlock stated.

Then she left for the car, and Lestrade was left scrambling for them, because he wasn't going to call a cab at this hour.

"Mycroft just texted me, said she's driven your mother home. I'm sorry we stole you from her," Joanna said as she started driving, because such a thoughtful thing would've never crossed Sherlock's mind.

"It was worth it, in the end," Lestrade replied from the backseat, the letters safe inside the blanket in a grocery bag they'd found in the boot.

"So you think whoever it was took more? Letters, or something else?" Joanna asked Sherlock.

"We can't say for sure. Maybe the old woman was hiding money," she replied.

"Why live there, if it was a large sum?"

"Some old people grow attached to the place they've lived their whole life," Lestrade replied.

"Guess it makes sense."

"So," Lestrade continued, feeling like he was thinking out loud, and knowing it wasn't wise in Sherlock's presence, "if she was hiding money, it would be a robbery gone wrong."

"And it would fit in, with Mr Brown. Do we still think it was Mr Brown? Why did he confess if he didn't kill her?"

And Lestrade was going to say, that's a very good point, when Sherlock's phone rang.

She took it from her bag, then stared at the screen, eyes blank, shoulders noticeably stiff. "Hello," she said to the phone. "Hi, mum."

And even Joanna was upset, Lestrade could tell. As for himself, he'd never really considered the fact that someone, somewhere, must have generated Sherlock Holmes. And Mycroft, although it was even harder to imagine that they'd come from the same environment. Mycroft was much older; maybe something had gone horribly wrong in the meantime?

He could hear an old woman's voice, from the other side of the phone call. She was speaking fast and it was not loud enough to make out the words.

"Stop the car," Sherlock told Joanna, who had already activated the turn signal.

They stopped on the side of the road, out of the way of oncoming cars. They were close to Lestrade's house already.

"Sorry, it won't take long," Joanna apologized to Lestrade, who was suddenly feeling very out of place, on the backseat. "I think they've seen the premiere on the telly. They're the kind of people who do that, I think."

iOh./i

"And they didn't know?"

"To some degree, I think," Joanna replied vaguely.

"Do yours…?"

"Yes," Joanna replied. "They made peace with it long ago."

"Not that there's anything to make peace with," Lestrade replied, then hoped he hadn't crossed any lines.

"I wish they'd thought of it like this, too," Jo replied. "It's fine now. My brother asks me about girlfriends all the time."

Sherlock was leaning against the wall, and she'd taken out a cigarette, from a pack Joanna knew she had, since she looked resigned. With her other hand she held the phone close to her ear, only to lower it every minute or so, inhale and look up to the sky as she blew out the smoke, which looked very dramatic to Lestrade, who was a former smoker. Sound was muffled from outside the car, and Lestrade tried not to eavesdrop anyway.

He felt like he was being allowed into such a personal situation – even if it hadn't been deliberate, hell, he'd just happened to be there. He still felt closer to the consulting detective then he'd ever been. And he realized something – that had already occurred to him during the play, even though he'd almost forgotten about it in the following events: that there are times when we are required to make a choice and do something, with some urgency, as well. Specifically, this was one of those times, and the choice was between supporting them or not, and both were definitely actions – lack of support would have been as decisive as open disapproval.

He was unsure about how to go about it, though, so he just reached out with one hand, set it on Joanna shoulder, covered by her fancy coat and the sleeves of her velvet dress.

"Such a waste of a perfectly good dress," Sherlock said, when she finally ended the phone call and climbed back into the car. It was half past one.

"They didn't…" Jo began to ask.

"They were kinder… about it, than they were before," and Lestrade could only imagine what exactly they must have said before.

"But…"

"But they still think that it's not a good idea given my public figure, haven't I thought of my sister's career, and that… they don't want to judge, but they can't agree fully, either," she listed, staring out of the window. He hadn't expected her to discuss it, especially not with him in the backseat; but he guessed it made sense, since she was trying to minimize. It reminded Lestrade of his own divorce, of the times he'd told Sophie about all the things that bothered him, just as quickly, staring out of other windows, while claiming that they weren't bothering him at all.

"I'm sure your sister won't let them say that. She's a tough lady, isn't she," he tried to say.

"My sister is the only one who can stand up to mum," Sherlock said smugly, and he couldn't tell whether she was more annoyed at Mycroft or relieved at the thought.

"What did your dad say?"

"I don't think he's capable of independent thought," Sherlock replied, and Lestrade nodded, and thought he had an idea of the dynamics of the Holmes family.

"He didn't speak? With you?"

Sherlock shook her head.

Soon afterwards they got to Lestrade's flat, and they waited at the curb until he was safe inside, in the hallway. He climbed up the stairs to his door, at which point he remembered that he no longer had his keys. He hoped his mum hadn't left it unlocked, because this was London, not some small town in the South. He was quietly considering sleeping in the hallway, to avoid waking Margaret, when he heard the lock, quickly followed by the door being opened.

"You're back, already," his mother's voice said. "Heard your footsteps on the stairs. Those shoes are loud."

"It's almost two, I thought you were in bed."

"Never could sleep," his mother said, "when you were younger, and you and Robert went out to dance every weekend, I could never sleep. Neither could your dad."

"Some things never change," Lestrade said. He thought it must be one of those things one truly understands only when he has children, a scenario which grew more and more unlikely every day, for him.

"Have you discovered something?"

"Yes," Lestrade said, "it could be big, or it could be nothing." He never discussed police stuff with his mother and he always tried to phrase it in a way she'd understand. It helped him understand, as well.

"I hope you'll find whoever did that!" she said. She sounded very much awake, despite the hour. "Her poor son…"

Lestrade didn't have the heart to shatter her worldview, and tell her that more often than not the family wasn't as innocent and pure as she liked to believe. It was a burden he had to carry due to the nature of his job, and it didn't mean that Margaret had to carry it as well.

"Your friend, the consulting detective, and her girlfriend! They are lovely together. How times have changed, and for the better!" Margaret added, before brushing her teeth and retiring to Lestrade's bedroom, as he took one more blanket to the sofa, where he'd be sleeping during his mother's stay, since he didn't have a guest room.

Back at Baker Street, after they'd driven Lestrade home, a long night was ahead of Sherlock and Joanna. They'd both left their dresses on the back of the sofa, and they'd changed into more comfortable clothes; Sherlock hadn't been wearing too much makeup to begin with, and she wasn't going to try to remove it, but Joanna had attempted to wipe hers away, and now it was mostly smudged on her cheekbones. Her eyes were red; she was tired. They'd changed in silence and she hadn't tried to breach the subject of the phone call.

The doctor was thinking, Sherlock could tell; Joanna's eyes were focused on her, all curled up on the sofa, on her long legs that she was hugging against her chest.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Joanna asked.

"About what," Sherlock tried.

"Your parents. Or what we just did. It's out there now – it can't be undone. How does it make you feel. How…" Joanna began.

"Do you want to read the letters?" Sherlock asked then, because she desperately wanted to talk about the case, or anything else, for that matter.

"Don't you? They seem important," she said. She accepted the change of subject without complaining. She sounded passionate about it, even.

"Maybe whoever it was didn't even see them," Sherlock pointed out.

"Did they find the crawlspace or not?" Joanna asked her.

"Undecided," she said, because it sounded better than 'I don't know'.

"But the letters… I mean, maybe they said something. The Harry guy. Maybe she had some secret life not even her son knew about," she suggested.

"You're too empathetic, Joanna," was the reply. "You mustn't grow attached to random old ladies who live in housing estates and who were choked to death in their living rooms."

"But…"

"I know you probably do it because you see yourself in them, but it's unprofessional at best and I don't have time to read through twenty pounds of Mother's Day cards from an architect," Sherlock let out, as if it were one single overly long word, without pausing to breathe or to think about what she was actually saying. She only knew she'd hit the mark when she heard Joanna leave, her steps made heavier by the late hour, the sadness, that Sherlock knew she was responsible for, and twenty pounds' worth of letters and Mother's Day cards. She made no attempt to stop her.

Afterwards, she didn't sleep – she stared at the ceiling for a while, straightened her legs on the sofa at some point, looked at the light that came in through the blinds, until it became way too bright to still be night. A couple of times the air became thicker, and she didn't quite dream, but definitely did something similar. She saw the familiar glow of brown hair in the sun, the shape of the ears of the dog that had bitten her ankle that mild early spring day.

It was her first year of uni and it felt like the world had finally taken a break from tormenting her.

She'd been accepted into Cambridge, where her sister had also attended (and obtained a Law degree) and where she was studying Natural Sciences, although her parents would have preferred Chemistry. Unlike high school, no one was actively campaigning for her to make friends anymore, and she found it a bit easier to breathe.

Of course, everyone still recognized her at uni – it wasn't hard, with her height and dyed black hair. She'd bonded with her labmates, she guessed, two brown haired boys with glasses who worked hard and didn't ask personal questions.

Still, no one had ever seen her room from the inside, and she spent most of her time studying during the day and walking around the university during the night, only occasionally sleeping; until one morning in late March she inverted her schedule, for some reason she couldn't really recall, they might have had to do with Mycroft. She had time to kill so she went for a walk at one park she often visited at night. The French bulldog bit her ankle, the dog's owner smiled at her, and one hour later they had become friends.

At some point, somehow, Victoria Trevor, proud owner of a swimmer's physique, the sweetest hazel eyes, and a French bulldog, managed to see in Sherlock the very thing she was trying to hide, and that not even she was entirely aware of. They met again that Friday night, right after another day of Sherlock studying in her room and in lieu of her usual night walk through campus. They kissed. Her lips were softer than Sherlock had let herself hope.

A million tiny suspicions, fragments of her life, from early childhood to the previous summer, after her A levels, when her parents had forced her to come to the South of France with them, on white beaches full of beautiful French girls in bikinis – it had all clicked together. She would never bring home a nice boy for the Holmeses to meet: it was going to be yet another disappointment for her parents, most likely. But she was young, and as painful as it was to admit, she was also in love; she set the thought aside.

April and May, they spent every waking hour together, and they slept together too. Sherlock had a room alone, with a double bed; Victoria moved in with her. She listened to her, even when she talked about biology, or chemistry, or different types of soil, and never rolled her eyes. When she was seen around with Victoria, no one even tried calling her a freak.

They made love that first Friday night, and then some more times, not too few but not too many. Every time it sent a new shiver down Sherlock's back. When, in late May, she saw Mycroft for the first time since the fateful encounter, her sister shot her a knowing look. It wasn't acknowledged.

That June, she was invited to Victoria's house in the countryside; Sherlock tried really hard to suppress the fear, and the anxiety, because she knew that she'd been lucky enough to be liked by Victoria: pleasing her parents would have been asking for too much.

It ended up not mattering because, when Victoria came out to her dad over the weekend (her mother had died when she was a child), he reacted badly, to put it mildly. They discussed moving in together.

It ended up not mattering because, come July, Victoria gave her a speech, short and concise, very well crafted:

iWe have different ways of showing affection and I can't feel loved when I'm with you/i

iI love you dearly but this can't go on/i

And she knew that it meant: ithe problem is you./i

Afterwards she drank herself silly and she made a scene in front of her parents and Mycroft, mentioning the French girls in bikinis, Victoria and a few recriminations from her early childhood that weren't strictly related. Mycroft surprisingly stood for her, although she was very careful not to cross the line. It ended up, unsurprisingly, not mattering at all. They used to speak twice a year, and they still did.

Sherlock didn't remember much about it – about that time – but she remembered thinking, such a stupid, meaningless ending, for what had been by far the most meaningful thing that had ever happened in her short life.

Then she dropped out, and the rest was history.

Joanna didn't sleep, either – Sherlock could hear the muffled sounds of pages being turned, papers being handled by Joanna's surprisingly delicate hands. And she felt a pang of hatred in her chest, towards the letters, towards the case and the old lady, and towards herself too.

When Lestrade called Sherlock the next morning from work, he was surprised to hear Joanna's voice on the other side, and that he'd clearly awakened her.

"Sorry," he told her.

"Don't worry," she said, "it's late, anyway."

"Is Sherlock there?"

"Woke up hours ago. Now she's thinking, in the kitchen," she replied. Her voice was drier than usual – she always tried to make herself sound more welcoming, more pleasant when she was on the phone with him. Maybe now that they were closer she'd stopped doing that, or maybe something was going on that Lestrade wasn't privy to. He chose not to pry.

"Oh. Can you tell her we found twenty thousand pounds underneath the floor of Mr Brown's apartment?"

Joanna fell silent for a couple of seconds. "OK," she replied, "I can tell her that."

They were at the Yard less than forty-five minutes later, standing side by side but not really acknowledging each other's presence.

"So you don't think it was a robbery," Donovan stated, as soon as the saw the two women. "Clearly."

"Clearly not," Sherlock said.

"Maybe he made up the thing with the baby to keep the money for his family," Donovan tried.

"That's what I told her," Jo protested.

"No work today?" Lestrade took the chance to ask her.

"Day off," she replied.

"No. the neighbour didn't know about the money beforehand," Sherlock declared.

"Have you read the letters?" Lestrade asked them, as soon as he remembered them – he'd nearly forgotten about the letters when the team had called, with the news of the twenty thousand pounds. He knew it wasn't good, to let two official nobodies bring the evidence home, instead of bringing it to the Yard immediately. He figured they were already in too deep and therefore it didn't really matter.

"Twenty thousand isn't so much," Sherlock was musing. Jo looked like she was about to disagree.

"Not yet," Joanna said, "not all of them."

"We're working on it," Sherlock told him. Even Jo looked surprised.

"I didn't think they were actually important," she said.

"Then why'd you say that?" Sherlock admonished her. "You've been reading them until late."

"Because you said so."

"Don't undermine yourself." Which was surprisingly kind, coming from Sherlock Holmes.

"Please leave the originals here. You can make copies, if you want," Lestrade interrupted them.

Somehow, somewhere, Lestrade still felt the need to save face; he knew that allowing them on the crime scene was a huge breach of protocol already, as it had been on every single other crime scene they'd been to; he knew their very presence at the time was highly illegal, but it had reached the point where even Gregson knew about them, and looked away, so he guessed he had nothing to lose.

"Just don't ruin them. Copy machine is in the other room." They already knew where.

They got to work. Sherlock, as smart as she was in most other aspects of her life, had never quite got the hang of the copy machine. John, on the other hand, was very efficient. "Mum was a secretary," she'd told him once, "I might as well be one by now."

As they worked, they bickered – about the milk, the experiments Sherlock left lying around, the microscope she didn't quite treat with care. At a slower pace than usual, but they bickered. "Thank God you don't do that with the violin," Lestrade heard Jo say.

Even Anderson came around at one point. "The old lady again?" he asked them. "Just leave it. It was the neighbour. It's not like they're going to give you theatre tickets for this," he reminded them, because he wasn't quite over the fact that he hadn't been invited, even though he hadn't even contributed to the big theatre case.

"I don't think they do it for free stuff!" Jo snapped back. Which surprised Lestrade, because he'd never heard her snap at anyone, not even Sherlock, and that was saying a lot.

Sherlock didn't comment – just raised her black eyebrows, once. Then got back to the letters.

"This one isn't a letter," Jo said after a while, after Anderson had left. "I noticed last night. It's a Word document. It looks like a story."

"She was a writer," Sherlock said, quickly setting the paper aside with the others. There was something derogatory in the way she said it that didn't sit well with Lestrade.

Once they were finished, Sherlock attempted to leave without saying goodbye, so Joanna dragged her to Lestrade's office, where she thanked him for the patience, which made him smile.

"So," he tried, "have you… settled things with your parents?"

He'd never dreamed of asking something so personal to the consulting detective; but after he'd witnessed that phone call, he felt like something had shifted in their dynamics, like he'd finally breached some kind of barrier, which was supposed to be breached much sooner in most relationships. Joanna smiled with just one corner of her mouth, and without happiness.

"They… they'll come around," Sherlock said, with disdain, perhaps too much to be natural. "There's not a lot I can do about it. Thankfully they haven't asked us to come over for the big Christmas lunch," she offered, looking truly disgusted, now.

Lestrade tried to imagine the two of them – plus Mycroft – sitting at the world's longest table, butlers and maids carrying the food back and forth, and with them were two mysterious figures, tall, with icy blue eyes, emanating authority and fear. Then he imagined himself, instead of Joanna, or beside her, and Mycroft instead of her sister. The female mysterious figure was asking him what he did for a living, expecting 'banker', maybe, or 'Prime Minister', and…

"Oh," Lestrade said, because they were both staring. "I'm sure you'll get there, eventually."

"We're celebrating at Baker's Street instead, with Mrs Hudson and friends, I guess. Wanna come?" Jo asked him. Sherlock was looking at the floor. "Mycroft will be there too!" Joanna added.

"Not on the 25th," he replied.

"That could work, we were thinking the 24th," she replied.

"My mum's coming to London again," Lestrade explained. "We'll celebrate at my brother's house, with the kids." He didn't really see the point of sharing such information, except that Joanna was nice and he was beginning to consider her a friend, and they'd just decided to spend Christmas Eve together.

"Lovely!" Joanna said. "He's got three, hasn't he?"

"Two girls and one boy. They're lovely," Lestrade replied.

Jo didn't even have time to reply, before Sherlock took her hand and forcefully dragged her outside.

Lestrade's shift was almost over – it was five minutes to five. His phone let out a single beeping sound, which was something it didn't do as often as it once had, before the divorce. He picked it up without even thinking, expecting a text from his brother, a photo of the kids, maybe.

Instead, the screen said 'Mycroft Holmes'. And that's when Lestrade's heart skipped a beat.

iYour shift must be almost over,/i the text said. iMeet me for drinks?/i

And Lestrade wondered, in no particular order, how on Earth Mycroft knew he was free – although that wasn't exactly a wild guess, nowadays; and, more importantly, how on Earth she knew his shifts. Or maybe he'd told her – the memories of the previous night were blurry.

iSure,/i he replied without thinking, then damned himself. iWhere do you want me to go?/i Hoping he didn't sound overeager, but secretly hoping he did.

iI'll send a car to Scotland Yard,/i she replied, and at least, Lestrade thought, she sounded just as overager. No one had ever sent as car for him before.

And sure enough, at five o'clock in the afternoon – five past, actually, Lestrade made a stop to the bathroom to freshen himself up and stare at his old suit, desperately wishing he'd worn the nicer one instead – a black car with tinted windows was parked just outside the entrance. To further dissipate any doubts he still had, the door opened as soon as he left the building, and a muscular young man walked out of it. He had long hair, perfectly styled in a bun, and wore a fancy looking suit; Lestrade suddenly wished for the pavement to collapse underneath him and swallow him whole.

"Mycroft's friend?" the handsome man asked.

"It's me," he confirmed, "Gregory Lestrade."

"Agamemnon," the handsome man replied, without giving a surname, and Lestrade thought, iof course/i.

He made Lestrade sit in the back, as he drove to a rather fancy street by Hyde Park. Mycroft was waiting for him there. She was still dressed in black – he'd never seen her in any other colour; this time, it was a lacy blouse with a long skirt underneath.

"Wow" he told her, "you look lovely!"

She smiled, exposing perfect white teeth; and when Lestrade thought she'd mercifully neglected to mention his pitiful state, she added, "You look quite handsome, as well." He had to stop himself from shaking his head.

They walked past a shop with many different tabloids all lined up in the window – and Lestrade saw, couldn't help but notice, the photos they'd all chosen for the cover.

Sherlock and Joanna, clad in their dresses, wearing makeup, although Sherlock's wasn't as noticeable – and, most importantly, holding hands. iCrime lesbos/i, one said; and it was by far the kindest. Mycroft saw them, Lestrade didn't doubt it; but she said nothing about them.

She led the way, picking a window table inside a fancy looking coffee shop. It had been so, so long for him – for Lestrade, the newly single man – since he'd last done that: dating. Just dating – two people who barely know each other, who feel too old to be doing this, and a table with two cappuccinos between them. Getting to know each other. So, do you have any siblings?

He knew the answer to that one. And he had to remind himself constantly that the woman sitting in front of him in the café, who was younger than him by a mere three years, but wiser by a thousand, was the sister of the only other woman in his life except for Donovan, now that Sophie had left him.

They did look a bit alike, in the shape of the eyes, maybe, even though Mycroft's were a much warmer shade of blue, and the thin hawk-like nose, which looked lovely on Mycroft. Her makeup was always impeccable, and she chose her clothes carefully: she put so much effort in the way she looked, he could tell. Sherlock did, too, Lestrade was sure, even if Anderson often commented negatively on what the detective wore to crime scenes, as if it mattered. Sherlock favoured black jeans and slacks, and dark coloured shirts, with flat shoes, from the men's section, apparently for comfort: but why the long coats, then, so impractical for chasing suspects and climbing up walls? No, Sherlock took just as much pride as her sister in her own wardrobe.

"I hope it's not weird, since you're so close to my sister," Mycroft interrupted his train of thought.

"Oh, not at all, it's just… just strange that you two are in fact sisters, if you get what I mean."

"Yes, we get that a lot," she replied. She was smiling, so Lestrade knew it hadn't been a faux-pas.

"And that, well… I wouldn't have said that I'm close to her until a few days ago, but it feels like something clicked now. Joanna helped."

He knew it sounded cheesy, but also that she was smart enough to tell it was true.

"I'm truly amazed at how far my sister has come with people lately. And you," Mycroft asked him, "do you have siblings?"

The question caught him off guard. "I figured you already knew," he said. "Everything about me."

She was not smiling now. "I guess I could," she replied, after a few seconds during which she held her chin with her right hand, nails impeccably painted a deep burgundy. "I could know everything about anyone, in fact, with relatively little effort. I did, once upon a time," she told him. "Before seeing… well, anyone I saw. But I discovered that it takes something away."

"Does it?"

"I want to hear you say it," she replied.

"I have a brother," he said then. "Robert. He works in London, got wife and kids – three kids."

"You must be a great uncle," Mycroft said.

"I always liked kids," he began, then felt holy terror rise in his chest, because kids didn't sound like a first date topic. "...but Sophie and I had none. I always took my nephew and nieces to the zoo, when they were younger, because I loved it when I was a child."

"That's sweet," Mycroft said. "I gather Sophie is your…"

"Ex wife," Lestrade replied, joining his hands on the table as if he was praying.

"Oh. I don't have any ex husbands," Mycroft offered, and Lestrade felt relieved that he did not have to ask, "just serious relationships, here and there, no matter what Sherlock says about it."

"I promise she's never told me anything about it," Lestrade said, even though it wasn't exactly true. iShe likes them ruggedly handsome and grey, and every single man she's dated loved football./i

"She has a reputation for being so cold, but she never could keep her mouth shut," Mycroft said.

She ordered a croissant and ate it with more grace than Lestrade had ever seen, covering her mouth with her hand as she chewed, which was making him a bit self conscious. They spoke of their families and about France, and Lestrade discovered that the Holmeses went to France every year, on holiday, and that a grandma had been French, as well – that both Mycroft and Sherlock were fluent in French. Mycroft looked interested in the life story of Lestrade's father, and it made him realize that he liked to tell it.

At half past seven her wristwatch beeped – she looked at him with genuine disappointment in her eyes. "I have to go, I'm afraid," she said. "It was nice to see you."

"We should do it again, sometimes," Lestrade tried.

"Most definitely," she said, and just like that she was gone.

iStop by, when you're done with my sister,/i Sherlock texted him as soon as he got onto the car.

"She knew!" he said loudly, at which Agamemnon barely raised an eyebrow. Mycroft had taken another car – she had an important work dinner, apparently. Lestrade guessed that was why she'd dressed so well, and felt a bit ashamed because he'd assumed it had been for him. Still, in her busy schedule, she'd found a way to go on a date with him, a middle aged, grey haired, soon to be round bellied Detective Inspector of Scotland Yard, and the thought warmed his heart.

"Baker Street, then?" Agamemnon asked him, and God only knows how he knew. Lestrade nodded.

Sherlock and Joanna were waiting for him at the door.

"So," he said, "was it the letters?"

"Yes," Jo replied, "no, maybe, I didn't really get it. Not all of them were letters."

The copies were scattered across their dining table, loosely divided into piles. "A lot of it were… crafts the son made when he was in primary school, tests he passed with good grades, drawings – he was really good at drawing – or notes he made for her for Christmas and birthdays, but…"

"The Harry guy?"

"It was old," Joanna said, digging it out from the pile. "They began dating when she was just sixteen – in 1956."

"Oh," Lestrade said. "Since then?"

"Since then."

There was a heavy silence – and Lestrade felt heavy too, and like he was intruding, like he was seeing something he really wasn't meant to see. It was a feeling he got, sometimes, when he had to dig in underwear drawers, among sex toys and other things people usually don't put on display, but it usually felt more clinical, and therefore less awkward.

"She tried to write her life story," Joanna continued. Sherlock said nothing, looking at them from the sofa, where she'd scattered another pile of papers. "Several times. She rarely gets past her teenage years – but they all begin in the same way: iMy name is Louisa Parris, but I was born Louisa Elmer, on the 14th October, 1940, as the Luftwaffe was bombing the city. My mother, who worked as a maid, had been evacuated to the country, where she was alone with my older sister. A kind farmer hosted us in his house. My father was away for work.../i" Joanna recited.

Lestrade nodded; he was sure his mum had some stories as well, although no one had ever tried to ask her.

"She seemed to do it every few years, on her computer, and then she printed out the results… in 2005, she went further: iWhen I was nine I began working at a shop, run by the old Mr Parris. He had a son who was twenty years old at the time.../i"

"The husband," Lestrade said.

"She was nine…"

Lestrade didn't know what to reply.

"The courting officially started much later, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-six," Joanna resumed. "She resisted his offers, and started dating another farmer, Harry Walton." Joanna looked entirely comfortable to the spotlight; Sherlock looked almost proud.

"But," Lestrade predicted.

"He was her employer," Joanna said, "he had so much power over her, that he made them split as soon as she was of age, and then married her. Soon afterwards they had the architect. Very soon afterwards. And that's where the memoirs stop."

"The neighbours said they looked happy," Lestrade said, mostly to himself.

"You never know," Joanna said, and he thought she must have known a thing or two about it.

"This might be nothing, though," she said next, and her confidence crumbled around her like a wall. "It could be totally unrelated to the murder."

"Maybe," Sherlock interrupted her.

"Did the son know?" Joanna asked Lestrade.

"No clue," he said, "it's the first time I've heard of this, too." Which was true; because prior to Joanna reading the incipit of the poor woman's memoirs, he'd almost forgotten her name.

"We'll look for him, tomorrow," he told her.

She nodded, then her face lit up. It was very easy to tell what she was feeling at any moment, Lestrade thought, which was a quality he liked in people. "How was your date?"

"Sherlock told you?" He felt the urgent need to run a hand through his hair, which was almost completely grey; his mother said it suited him. "It went well. At a café. We're doing it again."

"I'm so happy for you!" she said. He thought they were at risk of becoming relatives, all three of them. Then Sherlock rolled her eyes.

"I'll let you know about any developments!" Lestrade promised on his way out, courteously escorted by Mrs Hudson – about the case or about Mycroft, he told to himself.

They did find the son: two days later, on his way to the airport, with a one way ticket to Thailand in his pocket.

The man whose name was on the ticket was also the owner of a recently opened bank account in Barbados, which took no more than fifteen minutes to find. On the bank account were eight hundred thousand pounds minus twenty thousand, and they'd been deposited there the day after the murder. His documents were skilled forgeries and he looked rather disappointed as the Detective Inspector was forced to arrest him.

This left Lestrade with more questions than answers.

He had a lunch date planned with Mycroft that day, and he was forced to cancel, on his knees, with his head covered in ash and two possible dates to reschedule, even if Christmas was less than a week away. At least, he thought, if Mycroft was as omniscient as her sister, which he had reason to think she was, at least she knew he was telling the truth.

iI understand,/i she replied. iI'm sure we'll find another day that works,/i which filled him with primeval dread.

Sherlock was already at the Yard, when they came back with the newly arrested son. Joanna was with her; they were both drinking coffee, standing in front of his office, way past the point where civilians were usually stopped. "Sorry about your date," Joanna told him, and Lestrade had to accept the fact that his relationship troubles were way harder to hide from them now.

"She knows you didn't bail on her," Sherlock said.

"That's the single most reassuring thing you've ever told me," he pointed out.

"Was the money hidden in the crawlspace?" Joanna asked the two of them.

"Mayb–"

"Most definitely," Sherlock said.

"Maybe it was a robbery," Lestrade said, "only committed by the son himself. He gave poor Mr Brown twenty thousand to confess to the murder, and he was planning on moving to Thailand."

"That much is certain," Sherlock said, rolling his eyes. "But why rob and kill her and then pay someone else to confess – which has never worked, ever – when he could have stolen the money while she went to the supermarket every Wednesday for the elderly discount?"

"But why did they have so much money? Or why did they live there, if they had so much money?" Joanna interrupted her.

"Finally a good question!" Sherlock burst. "The late Mr Parris had something to hide," she stated.

Inside the questioning room, the son still looked upset; not the way murderers did, more like a child whose mother has told him that he's not allowed to jump on the bed.

"What's so good in Thailand, anyway?" Sherlock asked, upon entering. It wasn't the first time he saw her – she'd been there at the first interrogation, too, although things had been less, well, tense back then. Now he was looking at her with a mean look in his eyes – with hatred, even. The most ruthless of killers sometimes looked way too meek in that room, but Michael Parris was absolutely terrifying. Not dangerous, because he was handcuffed, and there were guards standing at the entrance; just terrifying, because of that look in his eyes.

"She's going to be here too?"

"Yes," Lestrade replied, without further commentary.

"I don't want the bitch there," the architect told his lawyer, who shook his head. Lestrade knew why he'd said it – Sherlock's fame was well established; however enthusiastic they might have been, Jo's stories on her blog were quite clear on her abilities. For a guilty person, Sherlock Holmes really wasn't an ally. Still, it annoyed him.

"I'm staying," Sherlock stated.

The lawyer nodded.

"So, South East Asia. Lovely in the dry season," Sherlock said.

"No one told me I couldn't leave the country!" Parris complained, raising his hands to his head.

"No," Lestrade agreed, "but you did so with a new identity."

The man said nothing.

"This same identity is also the owner of a bank account in Barbados, containing seven hundred eighty thousand pounds. Do you confirm this?"

He didn't even look at the lawyer, then nodded.

"Yes," he added after a while. "They were my mum's! They were supposed to become mine soon, anyway."

Lestrade had to restrain himself from groaning. "Did you know about the money beforehand?" he asked.

"No," Parris said, "I had absolutely no idea it was there."

He was about to roll his eyes, then:

"He's not lying," Sherlock said.

The man was looking at her now, an open challenge in his features.

"You found out about Harry Walton," Sherlock stated, returning that look – she was great at challenges: every single part of her face, but mostly her eyes, and her thin lips, could communicate such disdain, such unpleasantness, that it was hard not to feel challenged.

"You're saying this, not me," Parris replied.

"You were looking for something else entirely. What were you looking for? Christmas decorations? And you went searching in the crawlspace where you used to keep it – but you didn't find Christmas decorations in there."

"Again, your words, not mine," he said.

"You found eight hundred thousand pounds, instead, that your mother had kept hidden from you – from your late father's illicit activities, for sure, I'm sure my landlady's husband knew him before he got the death penalty in Florida – was it the part he stole from the plant? Of course it was the parts," she repeated, and Lestrade knew she'd just now reached that conclusion.

The man rolled his eyes – but his cuffed hands were shaking; Lestrade was sure they were close to breaking him.

"And you got mad, because your mother had hidden all the money from you – and what a life you've had: you've had to work your way through university, only after many sacrifices you got to open your own firm, and now you discover that it could have been so much easier, and you wouldn't even need to pay your mum's rent…"

Parris was properly laughing now; the intensity of it, again, scared Lestrade.

"This is Sherlock Holmes? The famous consulting detective? The genius that other dyke writes about?" He spoke as if he had a large audience in front of him. "Because I know what you two are, you little…"

"Enough," Lestrade said, then got up from his chair, standing somewhat tall at five foot eleven.

"Oh," Sherlock said. She joined her hands in front of her, and bowed her head, with black curls all around it like a halo.

"You didn't know about your father's activities, then? Must have been such a shock, to see all that money…"

Her voice reminded Lestrade of his own primary school teacher, whenever a child started crying.

"...to know that your dad, obviously, dealt with the stolen car parts…"

"Bollocks" he shouted in the end. "All bloody lies." The dam broke and he began punching the table in front of him, as his lawyer crossed his legs and buried his face in his hands.

"Here's something you lesbos didn't find in the bloody crawlspace: my mum had written a hundred and twenty pages of the same bullshit you're telling me now."

Sherlock straightened her back. "She idid/i finish writing her memoirs, then," she whispered.

"A steaming pile of shit, that's what she wrote. That my dad wasn't my actual dad and that I was the son of this farmer she met – she was going senile, that's all."

"That's not so unbelievable, all things considered," Sherlock pointed out.

"That he forced her to marry him and quit the peasant – he gave her a bloody good life!"

"You iare/i Harry's son, then!"

"Are you even listening to me?" Parris shouted.

"You're right, I'm sorry. Please resume." Sherlock sat back down, crossing her long legs and holding her chin with her left hand, a caricature of an attentive listener.

"I burned the bloody pages – and made sure she deleted them from her computer as well."

Lestrade knew that it would be surprisingly easy to get the files back – especially if Michael Parris had neglected to empty the bin.

"And you took the money."

"Gave Mr Brown downstairs twenty grand to confess – he's got a kid, she's lovely, he wanted her to have an education or something. Something I didn't have," the son continued, "even though we had more than half a million stuck in the crawlspace!"

"If your putative father didn't actually dabble in stolen car parts, pray tell me, Michael," Sherlock began, standing from her chair – she was taller than Michael Parris would have been if he'd been allowed to stand, "how do you think they made all that money? Working at a Ford plant? Please," she said.

"Dad was a hard worker," the man replied. "Worked ten, twelve hours every day, started out mopping the floors and made it to the top of the chain."

"Eight hundred thousand, though?"

She really looked like Lestrade's primary school teacher now: her eyes were stern, but also cruelly compassionate, as if Parris were a particularly stupid and naive child, who'd just claimed to be the son of a celebrity.

"Yes," he said, but he was faltering, "I believe that's possible…"

"And why would they keep it there? Didn't your father start that business, right before he died? That nobody really went to, but it still stayed afloat somehow…"

"That's how he bought his car?" Michael asked, in disbelief.

"But he didn't have time to launder it all."

"No," Parris said, "you're just trying to convince me – of what the old bitch wrote. My dad was the better half of them – my dad is the reason why I turned out so well." He smiled. "My mum was a cold bitch who hated us."

"Anyone would, if they were in her circumstances," Sherlock replied, and Lestrade worried for a second that Parris was going to get angry, and stop talking altogether.

"...never any money, or a hug, or anything, really, she hated my guts my whole life – not a single nice word! And then all that shit about my father, I… I…"

"It was impulsive, then," Sherlock said, fascinated.

"She'd already called the publisher – the fuck did she want to make, an exposé? About a dead man? I couldn't stand to see her disrespect him so much. I guess I lost it, I'll admit."

"What did you do?" Lestrade said, closing his mouth, fixing his tie.

"The phone charger… she charged it in the living room, because she was scared of cancer or something. I wouldn't have been sad. Not after some of the things she wrote…"

The lawyer's face was hidden by both of his cupped hands now.

"I maybe held a little bit too tight," Parris said. "She was no longer breathing."

"And you took the money, thinking it was your dad's savings from a lifetime," Sherlock said, with a slightly mocking tone, "and decided to flee to South East Asia? You already had an alias ready," she pointed out.

"Yeah, got one for the building permits and stuff," the man said absentmindedly.

"I'm sure Lestrade's colleagues will be more than happy to investigate about that," Sherlock said, then got up and left.

Lestrade and the lawyer exchanged a look, a half smile, that meant that they were technically supposed to be disagreeing, but it was pretty obvious that they had a confession.

Two hours later, the first reports filed, Gregson placated, the architect jailed, he left Scotland Yard to find a black car parked right in front of the entrance. Agamemnon held the door open for him. "My boss has cooked ratatouille, monsieur," the handsome man said, as he drove through the traffic to somewhere outside of town, which turned out to be an honest to God mansion.

Later that night, in Mycroft Holmes's bed, he thought briefly about Louisa Parris, née Elmer, about Sherlock and Joanna and, lastly, about himself and the warm body beside him.

"You solved this case," Sherlock told her once it was over.

"We did," Jo replied, without even lifting her eyes from her phone.

"No. You did," Sherlock insisted, and it was clear from her face that it was fundamentally against her own nature to say such a thing. "You had a hunch and followed it, and didn't care about my opinion. That is a quality I appreciate a lot in a companion." She said as if it were a poem she'd been forced to learn by heart.

"Thanks," she replied, sounding uncertain.

"And I have to apologize for something else, as well," Sherlock added, her voice lower, legs straight in front of her. They were sitting on the plastic chairs outside the interrogation room, where Joanna had waited for them as they made Michael Parris talk.

"Let's go outside," the doctor said, as an affirmation, not an offer, and so they both got up and walked out of the police station, careful not to get too close to one another, always at arm's length.

"I'm sorry," Sherlock repeated.

"For what?" Joanna said. Sherlock knew that she knew – she figured that she wanted to hear her say it out loud.

"For what I said, the other night, after the play. That you probably see yourself in that old lady, because of the… because of your upbringing, and because of the thing with Sholto," Sherlock elaborated.

"I do. Did. But it still wasn't nice to say it out loud," Joanna replied. Her posture was defensive, no doubt a parting gift from the Army, and her eyes cold, and unreadable, which scared Sherlock.

"I didn't want to make you feel bad," Sherlock said then.

"No," Joanna replied. "I think you wanted to do exactly that."

Sherlock breathed in the cold December air – she didn't confirm or deny Joanna's claim. She stretched her neck, studied the Christmas decorations in the streets as an excuse, the wrapped gifts and comets and gingerbread men and all the stuff they'd hung to the cables they'd set up at the end of November.

"You wanted to push me away." Joanna stated it as if it were obvious, really; maybe it was for her. Sherlock wondered if that was how she always felt when Sherlock made her deductions.

"I wanted to make you realize," she tried to say. "So you could decide whether you wanted to run away" she explained.

"From what?" Joanna whispered.

"From me," Sherlock said. It was as if she had to sacrifice all the strength in her body just to say those two words.

"Are you scared?"

"I don't want to lose what we have over a stupid mistake. And I will make a stupid mistake, at some point," she articolated.

"But… if it's a stupid mistake, why would it destroy everything?"

Sherlock shrugged.

"We've been together for quite some time now, and we've been friends even longer. A year ago, I would've called you my best friend, Sherlock."

"What if the mistake isn't stupid, Jo? What if I fuck up? And you know I will," Sherlock retorted.

"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, I guess," Joanna said. "As with everything else."

Sherlock stared at the pavement for a few seconds – looking for something to say, she guessed, because nothing made sense, because she both felt like Joanna was right and like her own concerns were right and would eventually destroy everything. "Everything happened so fast," she tried. "After the play, I mean."

"Yeah, we were on all the tabloids."

"As you said, it's out there. It can't be undone."

"And how does it make you feel?" Joanna said, tilting her head as she asked, the way she always did.

"It's not bad," Sherlock said. "Everyone knows, now…"

"Yes, that's kind of the point," Jo pointed out.

"...which means that f I lost you…"

Joanna's eyes softened, at that – she stepped closer, put her hands in Sherlock's elbows, looked at her in the eyes.

"At this rate, you won't," she said.

"Do you promise?"

"I promise," Joanna replied.


End file.
